I’m a partner in a digital marketing firm, Counterintuity. How did I get into this line of work? People asked me to.

Specifically, starting about 20 years ago, they started asking me if I could bring to bear for their organizations those writing / directing / producing / acting skills learned from all those years in theatre. And the banks and the municipalities and the ad agencies paid a lot better than the theatre. So I started doing that.

As Tom Vander Well’s story shows, it looks like I’m not the only one that’s happened to. And here’s why:  working in the theatre is really really good prep for most things. As my good friend (and fellow theatre-builder) Tom Boyle says, if you’re going to be stranded on a desert island, you want to get stranded with theatre people, because they can build or fix anything, and do it from almost nothing. More than that, we tend to have strong behavioral skills.

One difference between Tom Vander Well and myself:  While he was a theatre major; I wasn’t (all my theatre training was on-the-job; my formal training was in writing and criticism). And so because my major was Literature and Language, I wince when he writes that he was “an alumni” of his school, rather than “an alumnus” — unless he’s more than one person.  Further proof that you always carry your past with you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Theatre, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.